Users meeting outside of Smith-Gardner’s control and support is a new thing for Ecometry customers, something the Special Interest Group for Ecometry has begun work on. The SIG is in close contact with the movers and shakers at Ecometry, the company formerly known as Smith-Gardner and maker of the direct mail catalog and e-commerce application for the e3000. Every two weeks the Ecometry user group has a conference call with Ecometry’s president John Marrah and VP-level managers, then confers privately in the second part of the conference call. Dan Buckland of the SIG told users at the recent HP World conference that the user organization was making plans for a conference separate from the meeting the vendor hosts once a year near its South Florida headquarters.

The Ecometry National User Group Conference is being proposed for early 2002, with Las Vegas as the leading candidate city for location. “It’s a very big challenge for any volunteer group to put on a user conference,” Buckland said. “It would be a whole lot lower key than the HP World meeting, or the Ecometry conference.” Content ideas include training, roundtable discussions on system performance and WebOrder. In the meantime, Interex said it wants to provide an Ecometry track as part of its e3000 Solutions Symposium in April, a chance for Ecometry customers to combine general HP 3000 training with specific training on their application. There’s more information on the doings of the Ecometry user group in the group’s mailing list, which can be accessed over the Web at groups.yahoo.com/group/macs-interex.